<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Across the Fabric of the Universe by lirin</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27795397">Across the Fabric of the Universe</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin'>lirin</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Captain Marvel (2019), Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Crossover, Friendship, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:08:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>17,786</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27795397</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Mara and Carol fell into each other's universes, and one time they figured out how to do it on purpose.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Carol Danvers &amp; Mara Jade</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Heart Attack Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiditallbefore/gifts">saiditallbefore</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dancing lessons were quite like fighting lessons, Mara thought. They both involved fluid movement; they both needed a sense of balance and the ability to predict what would happen next, whether it was your opponent's next attack or the next upswell of the music. And they were both quite tiring. Mara flopped down on her bed in her small apartment in the Imperial Palace, and flung her arms out wide as she stared up at the ceiling. She still had homework for her science and history lessons, and forms to practice for both dance and fighting—that was another thing they both had in common—and then there was a book on politics that the Emperor himself had had sent over. The message with it had said he thought she might find it informative, but Mara was pretty sure that actually meant "read immediately or else".</p><p>So she should probably do something about that soon. But for the moment, Mara just laid back on her bed. She was a child; weren't children supposed to get moments of time to relax and do nothing? The child heroes of the holobooks she sometimes sneaked out of the palace library all had downtime in their lives, in between and even in the middle of their adventures. Not studies and lessons as long as the day and night were long.</p><p>But the Emperor said that that what would make Mara into a servant worthy of him, and Mara wanted very much to be worthy of him. It was just that once in a while she wished she could both become the Emperor's awesomest servant <em>and</em> have some fun being herself. She rolled over lazily and looked over at the desk where she had left the datapad with the book on it, reaching out with the Force to grab it. It landed a bit heavier than she had intended, jarring her wrist, but at least she got it on the first try. The Emperor was always so disappointed in her when she couldn't do that.</p><p>But right now, she wasn't paying much attention to the book. Because beyond where it had just come from, behind the desk, there was a flickering in the air.</p><p>She had heard her instructors speaking of such a flickering, earlier in the day. They had whispered about how it betokened a thinness in the fabric of the universe. Mara wasn't sure what that meant, but they'd stopped talking whenever any of the children got too close, so she figured it was something important. Mara climbed off of the bed and walked over to the desk, reaching her hand out to the place in the air where the flickering was the most concentrated.</p><p>Her hand tingled slightly, and she reached out further. All of a sudden, the wall behind the desk disappeared, and in its place was a field of short-cropped grass. Startled, Mara drew back her hand, and the vision vanished. She blinked. Slower this time, she reached into the flicker, and once again the grassy field appeared. She almost thought she could feel a breeze on her face.</p><p>She really ought to be reading that book that the Emperor had sent over for her. Or doing her science homework. Mara glanced at the bed where she had left everything, then turned back to the strange portal. This was too interesting to pass up. With a shrug, she climbed up onto the desk, poked her head through the portal to where everything was green and bright, and then she stepped through.</p><p>Immediately, she was surrounded by green. She turned around, back to where she had come through—and flinched to find it gone, with only further green field in its place. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder what she would do if she couldn't get back. The Emperor would find her, she felt certain of that: but he would be very, very angry. But then she noticed a slight shimmer in the air. The flickering of the portal was less visible here, in the bright sunshine of whatever planet she was on, but it was still there. She couldn't discern the extent of it, but she reached out into the part of the air that had been directly behind her before she turned around, and it seemed to her that it must have been the part that she came through. There was nothing, but when she moved her hand up a bit and pushed it back further, her room reappeared for a moment.</p><p>So that was all right then. Mara took out one of her ornamented hairpins and stabbed it into the ground at her feet to mark the place. Once that was done, she no longer needed to stay right there. She straightened up, looked around for a second, and headed for the boundary of this grassy field.</p><p>It was not, she noticed, entirely grassy. Parts of it were just dirt, and there were white lines of what Mara took at first for some alien plant, but she realized after a moment that it was probably some sort of ornamentation. At the far reaches of the field were a variety of fences, and also other structures that might be some sort of seating. An arena, she realized, and walked faster. If she had been summoned into the center of an arena—even one as low-budget and ramshackle as this one appeared—that was no place to linger, especially when she didn't know what had brought her here.</p><p>But there were no crowds surrounding her; no audience waiting to observe her fate; so perhaps it was coincidence after all that she had come through here. If the edge of the universe was thin, it might be as likely to open onto one place as another, wouldn't it? (Actually, Mara had no idea what the answer to that question was. She wished her instructors hadn't been whispering so quietly that morning; perhaps they knew the answer.) The Force felt strange here. Uncertain almost: as if it didn't know whether it entirely belonged here.</p><p>Though there were no crowds, Mara suddenly realized that the arena was not entirely empty. There was a human girl around Mara's age standing near one of the distant fences. There was nowhere to hide, and so Mara walked right towards her instead. Few people Mara's age had the amount of training she had, so Mara figured she ought to be a match for her if it came down to it.</p><p>"Are you on the other team?" the girl called when Mara got close enough. Mara was relieved to find that she spoke Basic; her accent definitely wasn't Coruscanti but it was intelligible enough. "The Owls, right? I didn't know they had any girls. Usually I'm the only one on either team. But I'm sure you know how that is."</p><p>Mara blinked, wondering if it would be better to attempt to lie and hope that she didn't get caught out (Team of what? What were owls?  What sort of competition occurred in this arena?) or to tell the truth and hope that the girl wasn't the one responsible for bringing Mara there.</p><p>Mara rather thought that she was responsible for bringing herself here, but then she'd been tricked and lied to before. Of course, that was all on Coruscant and this was—wherever this was. The sun was too bright for her to be able to check star patterns, but the lack of tall buildings and the soil under her feet made it clear she had somehow come to a different planet.</p><p>"I'm not an owl," she said with sudden decision. "I'm just visiting this planet. Would you mind showing me around a bit?"</p><p>"The <em>planet</em>?" the girl gasped. "You're not from...from Earth? That's so cool! So what are you doing here, if you didn't come to play baseball?"</p><p>"I was just curious," Mara said. "I wanted to look around. I so rarely get a chance to get off planet anymore. So I might as well have come here to play baseball as anything else. Can you show me how?"</p><p>"Sure," the girl said. "My name's Carol."</p><p>"I'm Mara."</p><p>"The game won't start for more than an hour, so we can use the field for a bit and it will be okay," Carol said. "I try to always get here early because if I'm ever not right on time they'll blame it on me being a girl even though every single other person on the team has been a minute late at least once. And my dad said he had important errands so he could either drop me off three hours early or not until right before our call time and not anything between, so I thought I'd better not risk anything later." She was rummaging through a cylindrical fabric bag. "So, like, do you know anything about baseball? I mean, you look like me, but you're an alien, right?"</p><p>"You can't tell anybody about me or that I exist," Mara said urgently. "I didn't exactly get permission to come here." There were <em>rules </em>about interacting with pre-spaceflight societies, and even though being the Emperor's protégé might let her stretch a point, she'd rather not test it. "But no, I don't know anything about baseball. I assume it involves a ball."</p><p>"Yeah, a ball like this," Carol said, producing a ball from the confines of the bag and tossing it up into the air before catching it again. "You hit it with a bat, but I don't have any of those. They're too big to fit in my bag, and besides it's not like I can practice with them much when it's just me here, and by the time there's other people here the coach'll be here with everything."</p><p>"And I assume the bat isn't all-important, or it would be called batball."</p><p>Carol laughed, and Mara grinned back at her. She wondered if this was what having friends was like. None of the other children in Mara's classes wanted to be friends with her, and she'd never bothered to try because they could only end up getting hurt. The Emperor was a powerful man, but he was not a kind one. Serving him was certain to be rewarding, but it was also going to be lonely.</p><p>But Carol lived on a planet that hadn't even heard of life on other planets. She probably didn't even know who the Emperor was, and with any luck, the Emperor had no idea her entire planet existed, much less one measly ten-year-old girl. Mara could make friends with her and she wouldn't be putting her in danger.</p><p>"So where does a base come into it?" Mara asked. "What sort of base?"</p><p>"You see those things?" Carol pointed out at the grass of the arena. The white ornamentation formed the shape of a large, off-center rhombus.</p><p>"At the corners?"</p><p>"Yeah, those are bases. When you hit the ball, you run really fast and tag each of the bases with your foot."</p><p>"And...somebody else is trying to stop you?"</p><p>"The other team. There's nine people on each team. They try to catch the ball and tag you with it and keep you from getting too far around the bases. When you get all the way around the bases, that's a run. The team with more runs at the end of the game wins."</p><p>"Oh, okay," Mara said. Carol was beginning to sound like Mara's history tutor, the one who always knew every smashball score, not only from the games on Coruscant but the rest of the Core and most of the Inner Rim. Mara had learned the rules to smashball and shockball and every other sport because they were some of the many things that the Emperor wanted her to know, but she'd never found them terribly interesting.</p><p>"I brought gloves, if you want to play catch," Carol said.</p><p>Mara didn't have any particular interest in doing so. But she did want to have a friend, and if her potential friend was suggesting catching a ball, then she supposed she might as well. "What are the gloves for?"</p><p>Carol held up some extremely oversized gloves with the fingers webbed together. Mara risked a quick glance at Carol's hand in case she'd missed something, but her fingers appeared normally human. "They protect your hands, and make it easier to catch the ball. I hope you're right-handed, because I am. You put the glove on your left hand, use that hand to catch, and the other to throw." She handed Mara the glove, put one on her own hand while Mara slipped hers on, then backed up a dozen steps. "Here, catch!"</p><p>The Force might be vague and hesitant on this unknown planet, but it was still present. Mara felt it ripple around the ball as it soared towards her. She held out her hand in its clumsily large leather wrapping, moved it a little more to the left as the Force led the ball to her, and—there. She hurried to close the glove over the ball, and brought her other hand over the opening for good measure, to make sure it didn't fall back out again.</p><p>"You're a natural!" Carol called. "My brother had to throw the ball with me for weeks before I could catch it consistently."</p><p>"Your brother plays baseball too?" Mara asked. She took the ball with her right hand, hefted it for a moment, then sent it speeding back at Carol. She kept a grip on it with the Force the whole way, but not too much. This planet had near-normal gravity, so far as she could tell: definitely enough that a thrown projectile would form an arc in the air. If it flew in a straight line, instead, then Mara's new friend would know that Mara was strange and unusual. Mara didn't know what Carol thought of Force-users. (She wondered if Carol even knew they existed, on this strange world where the Force was so quiet and there wasn't any interplanetary space traffic at all.)</p><p>"Yeah, that's why I decided I wanted to do it too," Carol said, catching Mara's throw with ease. "Mom suggested softball 'cause more girls play it, but I didn't think that would be as much fun. They throw the ball like this"—she held her arm low and swung it like a pendulum as she threw, where before she had swung her arm above her shoulder—"and Steve had already taught me to throw overhand."</p><p>The ball came towards Mara at a different angle than the overhand throw had, but the Force still led her right to it. This was almost fun, just doing a physical activity with a sort-of-could-be-someday friend and talking while they did it. Much more fun than the physical activities of Mara's dance and combat lessons, where the only talking allowed were the instructors' yelled directions—and they were not at all friendly. She threw the ball back to Carol, and sent another question along with it. "Is this something you want to do when you grow up? Or just for fun?"</p><p>"Just for fun!" Carol called back, taking two quick steps to the right to catch Mara's throw. "Hey, do you want more of a challenge? Go back further, out by second base!"</p><p>"Second base?"</p><p>"The one in the middle of the field. When I grow up, I wanna be a pilot."</p><p>Mara found the square base closest to the center of the field and stood on it, holding up her glove for Carol's throw. "A pilot of what?" This planet didn't have spacecraft, did it?</p><p>"An airplane. It flies like a bird—um, do you know what birds are? They're those things, up there. But an airplane's wings don't flap and it flies through the atmosphere because its wings generate lift because the air pressure is higher below them than above them."</p><p>"So your planet only has intra-atmosphere flight, then? Dependent on air pressure?"</p><p>"Nah, we've been to the moon. They used rockets to get there, so they could steer a bit but mostly the astronauts were just riding along while the scientists back on Earth did all the work. I want to fly airplanes where I get to be the one in control. Well, also they don't let girls be astronauts yet, though I bet someday they will. They didn't used to let girls be military pilots, but now they're starting to." </p><p>Mara wasn't paying enough attention to the Force's quiet signature on this planet, and her next throw flew wide, and too high over Carol's head. Carol dove backwards and to the side, glove outstretched. Mara thought surely it wasn't enough, not without the Force—but when Carol picked herself up out of the dirt, she held up the ball triumphantly. "Sorry!" Mara called.</p><p>"You should have seen some of the throws I made when I was first learning," Carol called back.</p><p>"Why aren't girls supposed to be pilots and astronauts?" Mara asked as she caught Carol's return throw: nice and easy, aimed right at Mara's chest where she barely had to lift the glove to capture it. "Are astronauts pilots of spacecraft? Why wouldn't a girl be capable of that?"</p><p>"It's not about whether they think we're capable, it's whether that's the way it's always been and nobody feels like changing it," Carol said. This time (with a bit of help from the Force), Mara's throw flew straight at her, only a few inches over her head. Carol lifted her glove and caught it without missing a beat. "It's like how girls are supposed to play softball and boys play baseball. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's not always going to be that way, not if I have anything to say about it."</p><p>"Hey, who's your friend?" someone called. Startled, Mara reached out with the Force and realized that two more lifeforms had approached nearby while she had been distracted throwing catch with her new friend. Her combat instructor would be very unhappy if he knew about this. Maybe that's why she wasn't supposed to have friends, so she wouldn't miss things like this. Sure, the two boys, both around Carol's and Mara's age, didn't look very dangerous, but it was the principle of the thing.</p><p>"It's a miracle!" said the second boy, crossing his arms. "Danvers found another girl who plays baseball!"</p><p>"Well, she can throw and catch, that doesn't mean she knows how to play," said the first boy. "Hey, Carol, who's your friend?"</p><p>Carol brought her glove down from where she had been holding it ready for a catch, and walked over to where the boys were. Mara followed, trying not to get too excited that the boys had called her Carol's friend. They were just making assumptions, like the second boy had assumed she could play baseball. </p><p>"This is my friend Mara," Carol said, and Mara grinned, because that was a lot better than an assumption. "She's just visiting."</p><p>"Well then she'd better stay out of the way," said the first boy, "because we're going to need the field to warm up in a minute."</p><p>"That's what I'm already using it for, right now," Carol said. "And there's plenty of room." She picked up her bag from where it was sitting on the ground near the boys. "More than two people can throw a ball around at the same time. Did you bring balls with you? If not, I've got some I can loan you."</p><p>The boys waved her off, and Carol didn't offer twice. She led the way back onto the field.</p><p>"So, does that mean we're friends now?" Mara asked, once they were out of earshot of the boys.</p><p>"I'd like that," Carol said. "Friends are good, and I don't have a lot of them. It'd be pretty cool to have a friend from another planet." She took off her glove, and put it in the bag. Mara followed suit, handing her glove to Mara. "The boys were right, we do need to clear off the field, because the coach'll be here pretty soon and having us do full-field drills. Do you wanna stay and watch the game?"</p><p>"I'd better not," Mara said. "I have lots of schoolwork left to do tonight, and the Emperor will be angry if I fall behind."</p><p>"Emperor?" Carol asked, her eyes wide.</p><p>"Yeah. He rules the whole galaxy. Probably even including this planet, except he maybe doesn't know it exists. I mean, since you didn't know there were people on other planets, then presumably he's never landed any troops here. Don't worry, I won't tell him about it. Not that I could tell him very much even if I wanted to, because I have no idea where we are." Mara glanced around the field. Two more boys had arrived and were standing with the others, lazily throwing a ball from one to another. "I'd better go before more people arrive and see me disappear through the portal. It's safe for now, they aren't paying any attention to us."</p><p>"One more thing before you go," Carol said, and held out the baseball. "It's for you, because you're my friend and I may never see you again. I want you to have something to remember me by."</p><p>Mara took the baseball from her. A real gift, from a real friend! Even if she didn't manage to get all her schoolwork done this evening, this was definitely worth getting in trouble for. "Um..." She tugged one of her hairpins out of her hair. "I didn't bring a lot with me, but I'd like you to have this. I'm glad we're friends." She led the way to where she had left the first hairpin, stuck into the ground in the middle of the field. "Do you want to see where I came through from? I was able to see this field from my room, so you ought to be able to see my room from the field."</p><p>"Of course!" Carol said with a grin. "Can I come through with you and see your planet?"</p><p>"Wouldn't your baseball team miss you? And you're safer if the Emperor doesn't know you or your planet exists." Mara winced as the corners of Carol's mouth turned down. "If it weren't for that, I'd really like for you to visit me. It would be really fun. We could have had a slumber party." That was what normal children did, wasn't it? Mara had never had the chance to have a normal childhood. She hoped Carol would.</p><p>"I guess that makes sense," Carol said. "And you're definitely right that my team would struggle without me." She grinned. "So what's your planet called?"</p><p>"Coruscant. I'm not sure if I'd call it <em>my</em> planet, exactly. I was born somewhere else—I don't remember where—but the Emperor took me from my family and brought me to the capital so that I could train to be his Hand."</p><p>"That sounds kinda sad."</p><p>"I guess so. I remember when I left my family, I didn't want to leave. But Coruscant isn't bad, and I'm learning a lot, and the Emperor says he's proud of me." They had reached the place where the edge of the universe grew thin. Mara reached down and took her hairpin out of the dirt. She wiped it off on her shirt and stuck it back in her hair. She reached out into the air above where the pin had stood, further and further until finally her room appeared. "I'm afraid it's not much," she said. "Just my room."</p><p>"It looks like something out of a science fiction movie," Carol said, mouth open wide. "All that tech...what's the glowy thing on your bed?"</p><p>"Oh, that's a datapad. There's a book on there that the Emperor wants me to read. I guess I forgot to turn it off before I came over here."</p><p>"Your planet is so cool," Carol said.</p><p>"Well, um, bye," Mara said. "I hope you win your baseball game. I'm glad we're friends."</p><p>"I'm glad, too," Carol said. "Bye."</p><p>Mara glanced quickly at the boys on the side of the field to make sure they weren't watching, but they were all laughing about something or other. Then with one quick motion, she stepped through the hole in the universe and stepped out onto her desk. She turned back, and for a moment she could still see to the other side. Carol was holding her hand in the portal to keep it from falling shut. Mara waved, and Carol waved back with her free hand. Then she let go, and all that remained behind Mara's desk was a boring plastisteel wall that Carol probably would have thought was "cool".</p><p>Mara tucked the baseball under her pillow, where the room-cleaning droids wouldn't find it. Then she flopped on her stomach on the bed and picked up the datapad. If she read fast, she'd still have time to get everything done tonight without getting into trouble or losing too much sleep.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"Roger, course locked in," Carol said. "Hey Photon, get a load of this sunset."</p><p>"It's the nicest I've seen in a while," Maria Rambeau replied over the radio. "If you don't have to change course from due west, it ought to last you quite some time. I almost wish I didn't have to split off."</p><p>Carol grinned. "I'm looking forward to it. Sorry you're gonna miss it." She checked the gauges and pushed the throttle forward a bit. This was a simple run today, no objectives except going out and coming back, just her and an F-15 and the best wingwoman ever somewhere off to her right. There weren't many places she'd rather be right now. In fact—as Carol gazed west and felt the rumble of the powerful engines behind her—she was pretty sure there weren't any places at all that she'd rather be. </p><p>Her flight suit felt like home, almost as if it were a second skin. She'd worn nothing else for the last month, even on days when she was stuck on the ground. There was only one thing personal about it: tucked in her right chest pocket, as a good luck charm, was the ornament from that hairpin her alien friend Mara had given her so many years ago. She wished she could have kept the whole thing with her, but it was too large to keep on her person, so she'd left the long pointy stick part of it at home and just kept the entwined metal ornament from the top. Sometimes she wondered if it was a metal that wasn't found on earth—it felt so cool and heavy as it sat in her pocket—but she'd never checked. If she checked, then either it would turn out to be boring Earth metal and that would just lose some of the magic—or it would turn out to be alien and people would ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions and maybe take it away.</p><p>"This is where I leave you," Maria radioed. "Enjoy your sunset." Behind Carol, her plane broke off to the right, turning smoothly north.</p><p>"Roger, Photon." Carol dipped her F-15's wings from side to side in farewell. Then she pushed the throttle even further forward. She had more ground to cover than Maria did, but that didn't mean she needed to be the second one to arrive back at base.</p><p>For about ten minutes, her flight was smooth. Then all of a sudden, the plane shook briefly. It felt like something had impacted it, but the engines and flaps still responded normally. Perhaps it had just been a bird. Carol breathed a mental apology to the animal, and glanced over her shoulder to make sure there wasn't any visible damage.</p><p>"Mara?" she gasped. She turned her head back to face front, throttled down, and blinked a couple of times. Surely she was imagining things. But when she risked another glance over her shoulder, her alien friend was still sitting in the WSO seat behind her. Carol hoped that the spare headset hadn't been removed when her plane was prepped for this solo flight. She turned around again and tapped ostentatiously at her own headset and the microphone there, hoping Mara would take her meaning and be able to find the spare.</p><p>She was glad this hadn't happened before Maria had headed north; she wouldn't have wanted to be glancing over her shoulder so frequently if she'd still been flying in tight formation. "If you've got the headset on, we should be able to talk to each other," she said.</p><p>"I've got it on," came over her radio. "Do I need to do anything else?"</p><p>"No, I can hear you just fine. It's good to see you. Well, not that I should actually look at you much, because I need to concentrate on flying. I'm glad you managed to appear inside the plane, and not out on the wing or something."</p><p>"Yes, that was lucky," Mara said. "So you became a pilot, then, just like you said you wanted to. Congratulations."</p><p>"Thanks! Did you achieve what you were working towards, of becoming the Emperor's Hand?"</p><p>"I did," Mara said. "He let me go on more and more solo missions as I got older, until I passed my final test in my mid-teens, and I've been his Hand ever since."</p><p>"Do you like it?"</p><p>"Well, I'm good at it. And it's enjoyable to travel all over the galaxy and see new and interesting places. Sometimes the people I kill are criminals, taking advantage of and hurting other people, and even though it's never fun to take a life, it never bothers me too much. But other times my targets are people who think they're doing the right thing, but in so doing they are defying the Emperor whom I serve. I know that they still deserve death, but that's not my favorite part of the job." She was silent for a few moments; Carol was too busy with the controls to think of how to respond to such a loaded statement. "But you probably don't want to hear about all that," Mara went on. "Do you want to hear about the ships I fly?"</p><p>"I'd love to," Carol said.</p><p>"My usual ride is a Z-95 Headhunter," Mara said. "They're not as popular as they used to be—lately S-foils are all the rage. Some people have been motivated to switch because of overheating problems with the Headhunter, but I've never had that issue. But ships with S-foils also provide stabilization and greater weapons coverage when you lock them open—you keep them locked down into a single wing shape while flying the rest of the time—so maybe I'll try one sometime. Incom came out with an S-foiled starfighter that looked pretty good a couple of years ago—the T-65 X-Wing—but then the Rebels attacked Fresia and stole the plans and all the prototypes. But anyway, I stick with the Headhunter, which has a single wing structure. Not too unlike your ship, to tell the truth. Its top sublight speed is a hundred megalights per hour. It doesn't have a built-in hyperdrive, but whenever I have the choice, I fly one that's been modified to add a hyperdrive motivator. Hyperspace is an alternate dimension that can only be entered when traveling faster than light, and it's what allows people to travel around the galaxy without taking years."</p><p>"You can travel faster than light?" Carol asked with excitement. "We've broken the sound barrier, but physicists say the light barrier is still a long ways away from being solved."</p><p>"Unfortunately I don't know much about the science behind it, or I'd tell you," Mara said. "But yes, we can. It's not as exciting as it sounds. Most of the time when I'm in my Headhunter, I don't know if it's even going much faster than you are now. And of course in space there's a lot less to look at."</p><p>"I think I wouldn't mind looking at what there is to look at, though," Carol said. "I've always enjoyed looking up at the stars."</p><p>"I wish I could show it to you," Mara said. "But since you're not there and I'm here, how would you like to show me what your ship can do instead? It's beautiful."</p><p>"Thanks," Carol said. "It's an F-15E Strike Eagle. It can reach two and a half times the speed of sound, and reach an altitude of sixty thousand feet. Above that point, the atmosphere's too thin for it to remain consistently level, since our planes don't have the capabilities your ships do. But we won't go anywhere near that altitude today, because you need supplemental oxygen for that, and you don't have an oxygen mask. Hold on, I'm about to show you how fast it can go." She shoved the throttle forward, and the afterburners kicked in.</p><p>"Nice!" Mara exclaimed after half a minute. "How's the maneuverability?"</p><p>In response, Carol pushed the stick all the way to the left and then to the right. She throttled back, then pushed the nose up in a loop-the-loop. "I know your visibility back there isn't the greatest, but those controls in front of your seat are fully functional," she said once she'd leveled out. "How do they look to you, are they similar enough to what you're used to or are they completely unintuitive?"</p><p>"I think I've got a pretty good idea," Mara said. "Are you offering to let me try?"</p><p>"If you're game," Carol said. "I wouldn't make this offer to just anybody, but then my alien faster-than-light-speed space fighter pilot friend who just unexpectedly teleported into the WSO seat of my plane isn't just anybody."</p><p>"I appreciate your vote of confidence," Mara said. "Are you ready?"</p><p>"Go for it." Carol lifted her hands from the controls, though she stared at the readouts and stayed ready to resume command at a moment's notice. The plane slowed for a moment, then leaped forward. Mara must have pushed the throttle to max, the same as Carol had done a minute before.</p><p>For a while, their course remained straight ahead while the speed varied. Then Mara must have decided she was comfortable with the throttle, because she branched out to the stick. She mimicked the same left-right jog that Carol had made earlier, then turned to the left in as tight a circle as the plane could manage—which wasn't that tight; Carol had been in lots of planes with better turning radiuses than the F-15—until they were headed the same direction as before. "It handles nicely," Mara said. "If I didn't know it was intra-atmosphere only, I might not even have been able to tell."</p><p>"I'm quite impressed at your ability to pick up something new. If I didn't know you'd never flown an F-15 before, I doubt I would've been able to guess. Ready for me to take her back over?"</p><p>"I suspect you'll be more comfortable once you don't have a complete neophyte with poor visibility controlling your plane," Mara said. "Go ahead. So did your team win that baseball game?"</p><p>Carol laughed. "Yes, we did. I remember I got a hit my first at-bat, and was wishing that you'd been able to stick around for a little while longer so that you could have seen it. Though of course you would have had to stay a while longer than that, since they wouldn't have looked kindly on a stranger wandering onto the field in the middle of the game. Say, however are you going to get back this time? I assume you weren't able to mark the piece of air that you fell through with a hairpin."</p><p>"I'm afraid not. Frankly, I don't have any idea what I'll do."</p><p>"How did you end up coming through? Was it like before?"</p><p>"It was a bit more unexpected this time," Mara said. "I assume the fabric of the universe must have grown thin as it did before, but I didn't notice any of the flickering that I had seen previously. I was walking down a corridor on the cargo ship that the Emperor gave me, and then all of a sudden I was simultaneously tripping over the controls of your plane and hitting my head on the canopy."</p><p>"Well, if we can't get you back, you're welcome to stay," Carol said with a grin. "But we'll try to figure it out."</p><p>"We'd better," Mara said. "We don't want the Emperor to come looking for me. You wouldn't like what he'd do to this planet."</p><p>Carol shivered. She wondered what exactly her friend was mixed up in, but she wasn't sure whether it would be a good idea to inquire. "What about you, were you able to finish all your schoolwork that night?" she asked instead.</p><p>"I did, though I didn't get quite enough sleep. But I'm used to that. When I'm on a mission, half the time I end up short on sleep, and even back then my teachers were already training me how to deal with that. I'm afraid your baseball didn't last very long, though. I was practicing with my lightsaber in my room, which wasn't a very good idea to begin with because there were too many things crowded into a small room, and I'm lucky nothing else got damaged. But it was just as well, because I wouldn't have had the space to keep something that large with me for very long as the Emperor sent me throughout the galaxy. But when it got chopped up, I took some of the leather cover and kept that with me, because it was small enough to keep in my pocket. I've got it with me now, actually."</p><p>"I'm glad you thought it was worth keeping," Carol said. "I kept the top piece of your hairpin, too. I took off the pointy part because it was too big to fit easily in my pocket and I kept accidentally stabbing myself." She checked the display panel readout. "I was intending to break south around here, but I don't exactly have to. I was thinking, I could try retracing my flight path exactly the same way I came out here. Other than when I was showing off for you and then when you tried some tricks of your own, I was staying at the same altitude throughout. If we got lucky, we might be able to go through the exact piece of space that we went through on the way out, where the fabric of the universe is thin or whatever."</p><p>"It's worth a try," Mara said, and Carol swung the F-15 into a wide turn. </p><p>She'd lost some altitude with their various acrobatics, so she went ahead and started climbing at the same time. Not too much, though. She was pretty sure she remembered the exact number that had been on the altitude reading. She hoped she was right, and that she wouldn't accidentally send Mara tumbling through space or anything. She keyed her radio. "Hey Photon, I'm taking a more direct route back to base. Retracing my steps."</p><p>"Better not be a slowpoke about it," Maria replied after a few moments. "I'm almost home myself." She didn't ask what had made Carol change her plans, but Carol knew she'd ask once they were both back on the ground.</p><p>And if Carol had a passenger in her plane when she landed, Maria wasn't the only person who would be asking questions. <em>Lots </em>of them.</p><p>"Friend of yours?" Mara asked.</p><p>"My wingwoman. She's always got my back and I've got hers. We're closer than friends, I'd say we're more like family. Her daughter calls me Auntie Carol."</p><p>"That's nice," Mara said.</p><p>"When we were first assigned here, we were the only two women pilots on the whole base." Carol smiled, remembering how glad she'd been to learn that she wasn't the only one. "We initially drew together just because of that and bonded over common experiences, but since then we've become friends for more reasons than just that. And these days there's at least a few more women around than there were when we arrived. There's this scientist, Dr. Lawson, who just arrived last month. She's really something. The sort of person where it feels like just talking to her for a couple of minutes makes you a smarter person."</p><p>"I'm glad you've got friends here," Mara said. Her words were short, and Carol wondered if she might be jealous.</p><p>"They don't make up for not having you around," Carol said quickly. "I wish you could stay."</p><p>"I wish I could, too," Mara said. "But truly, I'm glad you have people who can be good friends to you. Photon, and Dr. Lawson. They sound nice."</p><p>"Thanks," Carol said. "So what do you think? First time could be a coincidence, but if we've crossed paths twice now, then it seems likely that it could happen a third time and maybe more, right?"</p><p>"I'd like that," Mara said.</p><p>"I would, too. So what do you think you'll be up to the next time we see each other? What do you want to be doing with your life?"</p><p>"I'll probably still be working as the Emperor's Hand," Mara said. "I expect to do that until I die. So, I guess I hope I'll still be alive—which I intend to; I'm really good at what I do. What about you?"</p><p>"Maybe they'll be letting women fly in combat by then. I mean, who knows how long it's going to be, so maybe that's unrealistic. But yeah, I figure I'll be flying fighter planes one way or another. I don't have any plans to change that any time soon."</p><p>"No plans to upgrade to being, what was it, an astronaut?"</p><p>Carol grinned. "Earth's atmosphere is far enough off the ground for me."</p><p>"It's been nice, having the chance to see you again. Well, not that I can see that much of you around the back of your seat. I know it sounds foolish because we'd only met once, but you're one of my best friends."</p><p>"It's the quality, not the quantity, that counts," Carol said, keeping a close eye on her altitude. "We totally count as friends even though we see each other so rarely."</p><p>"But I'm glad you have other friends who are there for you all the time, not just when the fabric of the universe thins out," Mara said.</p><p>"Do you have anybody like that?"</p><p>"Well, I have the Emperor inside my head no matter where I am, so that's something," Mara said. "But he's nothing like you. He just gives me orders and frankly he's rather frightening. I like you and your friends much better."</p><p>"We're almost to the place where I think you showed up," Carol said. "So we should say our goodbyes, just in case this works." She stared at the display and was glad Mara hadn't shown up a year sooner when she was less familiar with the F-15. The portal might not be very big, and Carol was going to have to be extremely precise to have a chance at hitting it at all.</p><p>"Goodbye, then," Mara said after a moment. "I'm glad you're my friend, Carol. I look forward to seeing you again."</p><p>"I'm glad you're my friend, too," Carol said. "Thanks for the company. Goodbye, and good luck."</p><p>The F-15 roared forward through the sky. Its altitude remained as steady as Carol could keep it. She didn't dare take her eyes off the panel for a moment to look over her shoulder, but after the moments of silence stretched into nearly a minute, she said, "Um, Mara?"</p><p>There was no reply.</p><p>Just in case, Carol waited another minute with her eyes still glued to the controls before she glanced over her shoulder. Mara was gone. Carol hoped she'd gotten back to her ship safe and hadn't ended up floating in space somewhere.</p><p>She hoped the Emperor would be nice to her friend, since Mara didn't have anybody better than him in her life.</p><p>Speaking of...</p><p>"Hey Photon," Carol radioed. "I've got quite the story for you when we get back."</p><p>"Well hurry up!" Maria replied, and Carol smiled. "I'm already about to land. Photon over and out."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When she was a child, Mara never thought she'd find herself working in a bar.</p><p>Well, maybe for a case, she might have. But for sustenance? Never. She had the Emperor, and the Emperor was invincible.</p><p>That was before Luke Skywalker murdered him. Mara was going to kill Skywalker for his crimes, but not yet. Right now, she just needed to survive.</p><p>"I'll have a Tandoorian Ale," said a male human, leaning against the bar. "And my friend here"—he wrapped his arm tighter around a female Twi'lek—"will have the same."</p><p>Some friend. Mara yanked a couple of glasses out from below the bar and jammed them under the spout of the keg of ale. She might not have many (well, any at the moment) friends, but at least she didn't stoop to paying money for companionship.</p><p>"Get me some Corellian whiskey," called a male Devaronian at the other end of the bar.</p><p>"One moment," Mara called back, trying not to let irritation bleed into her voice. She set the ales down in front of the human and the Twi'lek, and turned to the whiskey barrel.</p><p>The door to the bar opened, and a female humanoid entered. She carried herself like a warrior and seemed to be wearing a uniform, but her insignia weren't anything Mara recognized. Most likely some fly-by-night security operation with delusions of grandeur or something else small and recently hopped-up, since Mara would have recognized most anything else.</p><p>The woman sat down at the bar directly in front of Mara. "I'd like the strongest beer you have, please," she said.</p><p>"Carol?" Mara blurted out.</p><p>"Excuse me?"</p><p>"Sorry, you look like an old friend of mine, and for a moment I thought you were her." The woman really did look like Carol; her hair was the exact same color, and though she'd scarcely had the chance to glimpse Carol's face as an adult, what she had seen of the facial structure seemed to fit.</p><p>But the woman was looking at Mara without recognition, so it obviously wasn't Carol. "Vers, Kree Starforce," she identified herself with a nod.</p><p>"What brings you to Scuur?" Mara asked, fetching Vers's drink.</p><p>"Is that the name of this city?"</p><p>"The planet, actually."</p><p>"That's odd," Vers said. "I thought we had landed on Andoth. I'm not sure how I ended up here. I need to get back."</p><p>"Sometimes the fabric of the universe gets thin," Mara said, handing her the beer. "I fell into my friend's universe a couple of times. Maybe the same thing happened to you. It's just hard to believe you aren't her. You have so much in common."</p><p>"You don't know anything about me," Vers said dully. "I doubt I have anything in common with your friend."</p><p>"Well, you both seem to have fallen through the thinness between the universes, so that's a pretty major commonality," Mara said. "Of course since the only other thing I know is that you seem to be a warrior or former warrior, I can't really comment beyond that. My friend was in the military. A pilot."</p><p>"Everybody in the Starforce knows how to pilot any craft if the need arises, but I wouldn't consider myself a pilot," said Vers. "We're agents and investigators and warriors and whatever else we need to be to accomplish the missions that we are given, for the good of all Kree."</p><p>"What are Kree? I haven't heard of them."</p><p>The woman frowned. "The Kree are one of the greatest races in the galaxy. They rule a vast empire." She shrugged. "Most Kree are blue, but some of them look like me."</p><p>"You're definitely not from this universe, then," Mara said. "This universe has a vast empire, but it isn't ruled by any Kree. Until"—the words still hurt to say—"until a couple of years ago, the empire was ruled by Emperor Palpatine, a human from Naboo. He was murdered by one of his most faithful servants, working together with the Rebel leader who had suborned him." Mara would not have been so faithless, had she been there. She would have killed Luke Skywalker, as Vader should have done. But she hadn't been there, and now she didn't have any idea how she was going to kill Skywalker. But she needn't bother Vers with any of that.</p><p>"I've never heard of this happening before," Vers said. "I almost wish..." She trailed off and sipped at her beer. After a few moments, she set it down and looked Mara in the eye. "I don't know who I am. I don't remember what happened before I was reborn on Hala. But I don't think I've seen you before. I get flashes of my old life's memories sometimes—standing on a beach, a Skrull pointing a gun at me—and you don't appear in any of them."</p><p>"Well, since there's more than one universe out there," Mara said, pouring a second Corellian whiskey for the Devaronian who had been waving at her frantically, "perhaps we have counterparts like ourselves in those other universes. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing"—was there another Mara out there who still served the Emperor and had never suffered through the pain of his death? was there yet another Mara who had never served him at all, but had made her own way in the galaxy?—"but it's not entirely unpleasant to think about. Perhaps you're my friend's counterpart from a universe separate both from mine and from hers."</p><p>"I don't have many friends," Vers said, "so I don't mind having you as an alternate universe friend, I suppose." She flashed a grin. "Does that mean I get a discount on my drink?"</p><p>"If you're from a different universe, do you even have the means to pay for it if I say no?" Mara asked, and chuckled when Vers swore and checked her pockets.</p><p>"I don't suppose you know the exchange rate for Kree credits," Vers said with a lifted eyebrow.</p><p>"No, but don't worry, I can float one drink for a sort-of friend," Mara said. "So, you said the Kree Starforce does a little bit of everything. What do you like best about what you do?"</p><p>"Well, we're a race of noble warrior heroes," Vers said. "I like being a hero. I like helping people. They tell me that maybe that's why I came to Hala, and that maybe I can't remember what happened before that because it was something painful and my mind wants to spare me. I hope I wasn't hurting people. I don't think I would do that. But what if the me I think I am now isn't the me I was before everything changed?" She took a sip of beer, and shrugged. "But I guess it doesn't make sense to worry too much about things like that. I don't have any control over who I was, only who I am now. What about you? Have you been working here for long?"</p><p>"Only a few months," Mara said. "I've been at loose ends for the last two years. Before then, I'd worked for one employer my entire life, and I planned to keep working for him forever. But then he died, and I haven't even been able to fulfill his dying wish for him. Instead I work in one trash dive until my abilities come back and then I move on to a different one. But like you say, it's a waste to worry about who you were before everything changed. More?" At Vers's nod, she refilled her cup. Considering the pittance Mara's boss was paying her, he could certainly afford to lose out on a couple of cups of relatively cheap beer.</p><p>"You said you have abilities," Vers said. "The Kree gave me abilities, but then they don't want me to use them. I'm supposed to keep them under control, and keep myself under control, but I'm struggling. I don't want to let them go, when there's so much I could do with them."</p><p>"It would be more accurate to say that I <em>used </em>to have abilities," Mara said. She stepped away for a moment to refill two more drinks, then came back to where Vers was still leaning against the bar, sipping her beer. "Now, they fritz in and out—mostly out—and they're more of a curse than a gift. I've tried to keep them under control, but I don't know if it's impossible or if I'm just not trying hard enough."</p><p>"Would you rather not have them at all?"</p><p>Mara leaned against the bar, thinking. "I suppose so," she said after a minute. "Ever since my employer died, all they've done is ruin my life again and again. What about you?"</p><p>"I like them, I just wish I could do more. That they would let me do more. I'm accomplishing so much for the good of all Kree, and I could do more if they would let me." A panel on Vers's wrist beeped, and she looked down and tapped at it for a moment. "I have to go," she said. "It was nice meeting you, um..."</p><p>"Jade." It was half the truth, at least. It wasn't the name Mara was using on Scuur, but nobody was listening and she didn't want to outright lie to Vers, since she was the closest thing she'd had to a friend in quite a while.</p><p>"Right. Thanks for the beer, Jade." Vers set down her glass and headed for the door.</p><p>"Hey! Girl! Whiskey!"</p><p>Mara sighed and headed for another Devaronian that had just walked in. "Do you want a double to start with?"</p><p>"Better make it a triple."</p><p>Vers stepped up to the bar next to the Devaronian. "I just thought of something," she said. "How do I know you're not a Skrull?"</p><p>"I don't know," Mara said. "Is that a riddle? What's a Skrull, anyway?"</p><p>"I've told you too much. If you're a Skrull, you could use this against me."</p><p>"I've told you who I am." Mara took a step down the bar, away from the Devaronian, and Vers followed. "My name is Jade. I'm originally from who-knows-where and lately from Coruscant." She didn't mention being the Emperor's Hand; similarity in appearance to Carol or not, Vers was a stranger Mara had met less than an hour ago and there was only so much that Mara was going to share with someone like that. "And what <em>is</em> a Skrull?"</p><p>"But maybe there's a real Jade, and you're simming her. Skrulls are shapeshifters that infiltrate planets by taking on the appearance of the populace. But they can only assume recent memories. Where were you born?"</p><p>"I don't know. My first memory is of my late employer taking me from my parents to go live with him on Coruscant."</p><p>"Eh, good enough. What did you do when you got to Coruscant?"</p><p>"I don't need to prove myself to you," Mara said. "If you were worried I was a Skrull, you could have worried about that <em>before </em>you talked to me about your abilities instead of after. I'm not a Skrull, I'll tell you that much. Whether you believe me or not is up to you." She didn't have the Force these days, but she did have a holdout blaster tucked in her sash and a knife up her sleeve. She was pretty sure Vers had several weapons on her as well, and if she decided Mara was an enemy then Mara would find out exactly how many. At first guess, Mara would say she had a blaster or some other sort of projectile weapon, and maybe a grappling hook as well. If she was smart, she probably had a blade on her, but Mara's instincts told her that probably wasn't Vers's style.</p><p>After a few tense seconds, Vers shrugged. "You're right," she said. "And besides, if I do have a counterpart in an alternate universe that you're friends with, I suppose I owe you. And for the beer. But I really do need to go. You said something about the thinness of the universe...so how do I get out of here?"</p><p>"Retrace your steps," Mara said. "That's what Carol and I did, and both times I found myself right where I'd been before I came through into the other universe."</p><p>"Okay, thanks," Vers said. Once again, she started for the door, and then turned back. "Your friend in the other universe. Carol. Does she have a good life?"</p><p>"I haven't seen her in years, but she seemed very happy last time I saw her," Mara said. "She's a pilot, a really good one, and she was definitely much happier with her life than I am with mine now."</p><p>"Okay, good," Vers said. "Bye."</p><p>Mara didn't have time to watch her go, because three of the bar patrons were waving their glasses in her face. She refilled them all with their alcohols of choice, then served two new patrons, and still Vers didn't come back. Mara hoped that meant that she had found the rift in the universe that she had come through, and had gotten back to Andoth all right.</p><p>She leaned against the bar—her boss would have wanted her to be cleaning, but he wasn't here and what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him. She hoped Carol was okay, wherever she was, and still having a better life than Mara was. Maybe she was still finding the time to play baseball in between flying her F-15s or whatever she was flying these days.</p><p>Sometime when she was on a planet with a big enough library, she really ought to do some research on the concept of multiple universes. Mara didn't really know how they worked, and she definitely didn't know why she kept crossing paths with people from universes other than her own. She didn't know why Vers looked so much like Carol, either. She didn't dare go anywhere near Coruscant these days, but maybe one of the librarians at the Hall of Records on Brois would know.</p><p>But at bar wages, it would be a while before she made it even as far as Brois. Mara sighed. Maybe it was time to look for a better job, even if it did mean not keeping quite as low of a profile. After all, her Force abilities would come back sooner or later, and once they did she'd be leaving this job anyway.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"We really did intend for dinner to be ready by now," Soren said. "But you know how children are, and then a pot boiled over..."</p><p>"It's fine, really it is," Carol said, leaning back in her chair. They were sitting in the Kree cruiser that had once been Mar-Vell's laboratory. Carol had been outside for hours, helping with the propulsion and flying alongside. She was glad of a chance to sit and rest now, so she didn't really mind whether dinner was ready or not. Just as long as the Skrulls didn't ask her to help with the cooking.</p><p>During this break, Carol planned to also discuss their potential directions of travel with Talos and some of the other top Skrulls, so she'd gone ahead and brought the ship to a halt in the meantime. It was easy enough to control these days, now that she had a firmer grasp on her powers, and it was continuing to be easier every day.</p><p>"Auntie Carol!" Soren's daughter ran over and threw her arms around Carol. Soren reached down and patted her on the head. "Have you heard from Monica yet?"</p><p>"Not yet," Carol said. "But you know it's really hard to communicate with Earth these days. I'm going to work on setting up a better system, but until then I'll let you know if I hear anything. And you know I can play Uno with you if you want me to."</p><p>"It's not the same," the little girl said, shaking her head.</p><p>"Yeah, I know," Carol said. "I miss my friends too." She nodded to Soren. "I think I'll go check on how things are coming along in the galley."</p><p>She headed out along the outer corridor of the ship. Once, back when Carol hadn't been a Kree and she hadn't even known Kree existed, Mar-Vell had walked these very same passageways. Carol wished Mar-Vell were still here. She missed her. There were a lot of people she missed, these days, but at least she knew she was finally doing the right thing.</p><p>There was a shimmer at the corner of her vision, and she blinked. After all this time, could it be another place where the universe grew thin? She hadn't seen one of those in ages, before she'd lost herself and found herself and then turned her life upside down in more ways than one. She hadn't seen Mara since those few hurried glances over her shoulder in an F-15, almost a decade ago. Both of the times she'd seen her friend, it had been Mara who'd come through to Carol's universe, but surely the portals could go both ways.</p><p>She stared at the shimmer a moment longer, then hurried away. "Hey Talos," she said, sticking her head into one of the smaller rooms at the end of the corridor. "I'm going to go on an errand for a couple of hours. Is it okay if we leave the ship here for a while?" It didn't really matter that much to Carol since she'd be fine if she came back through the portal into empty space, but it would frankly be easier if the portal stayed in the corridor, and if the ship stayed where Carol could find it when she returned.</p><p>"I was assuming we'd stay here at least overnight, and maybe for another day to give us time to discuss our options fully," said Talos. "I mean, we're in no particular hurry. We're safe, we're together, and we may not have a lot of room here but it's enough. So go, do your errand. Where are you going?"</p><p>"I'd rather not say," Carol said. "I'll be back soon." She waved vaguely in his direction and hurried back down the corridor. She wanted to go through it quickly, so that nobody (especially the kids) would notice and wander through after her and maybe get hurt in the process.</p><p>As soon as she touched the shimmer, she thought she saw something on the other side, but it looked so similar to where she was now that she wasn't entirely certain. She didn't stop to wonder about that, though, but reached her whole arm in and followed it with the rest of her body.</p><p>She found herself on another spaceship, which explained why it had looked so similar. From the proportions, it seemed quite a bit smaller than Mar-Vell's cruiser. Carol seemed to have come through at the back of the bridge, right in front of a small closet.</p><p>The one inhabitant of the bridge—a middle-aged man—moved suddenly, and Carol quickly stepped back into the closet. She wondered if Mara was around here somewhere, or if that wasn't the way rifts in the fabric of the universe worked. She should have asked Mara more about her experiences. Maybe Mara had come through into other universes thousands of times and only come across Carol twice.</p><p>The man stepped out of the bridge, mumbling to himself. Carol hurried forward and started poking around the control panel, hoping to find something that would tell her where she was. None of the stars she saw through the front viewport were at all familiar, and Carol had seen and knew a lot of stars.</p><p>All was silent in the bridge as she continued pressing buttons and doing her best to decipher displays, but she noticed some lights start blinking that hadn't been blinking before. Silent alarm, she realized, and turned around just as the man who had left came rushing back in, followed by another man with blond hair. "Who are you?" the second man yelled. "How did you get here? Chin, did you see where she came from?"</p><p>"I'm looking for a friend of mine," Carol said. She wasn't sure quite where to go from here—if these men didn't know Mara, or if they weren't friendly with her, she didn't want to mention her name too soon. Not to mention they didn't seem particularly inclined to trust her no matter what she said. Which, granted, she just showed up on their ship in the middle of outer space, so she could see where they were coming from. "I'm not an enemy or anything, I just kind of wanted to visit and, um..."</p><p>She was saved from having to say anything further when three more people walked onto the bridge. One of them was Mara.</p><p>"Carol!" Mara exclaimed, and waved. "It's fine, everybody, this is an old friend of mine."</p><p>"I'd appreciate it if you didn't get in the habit of having friends of yours stow away on my ship," said the man next to Mara. "Empire or New Republic?"</p><p>"She's completely neutral," Mara said. "From outside either of them. And she's not actually here, are you, Carol? She told me about some experimental hologram tech they were trying out. Come on, Carol, let's go back to my cabin to chat."</p><p>There were raised eyebrows on nearly all of the men around them, but they let Mara and Carol pass. Mara led the way down some stairs and a corridor and into a decently spacious ship's cabin. She closed the door behind them, and then walked over and gave Carol a quick hug. "Didn't want to do anything to prove you weren't incorporeal while we were around the others," she said, crossing the room to poke at a control panel. The lights in the room brightened. "They're suspicious, that's for sure, and they're not stupid either. I'll probably tell them after you've gone, but if possible I'd rather wait until we've moved on so nobody wanders into your universe. Until then, that seemed like the easiest way to explain how you showed up out of nothing and nowhere, and are going to be leaving into a similar amount of nothing. There's been a war on that just ended, but there's a lot of mopping up ahead of us and everybody's still a bit on edge."</p><p>"When I looked out the viewport, the ship didn't seem to be moving," Carol said. "Is there a reason for that?"</p><p>"The hyperdrive motivator was overheating. Nothing serious, but we wanted to drop out into regular space and make repairs before it blew anything actually important."</p><p>"So." Carol sat down on Mara's bunk and crossed her legs. "It's been a while."</p><p>"Yeah." Mara sat down at the end of the bunk, swinging her legs off the side. "How have you been?"</p><p>"Well, I kind of became an alien and then a superhero, so that's been interesting," Carol said.</p><p>Mara raised her eyebrows. "How exactly does one become an alien? You mean a non-human?"</p><p>"Yeah, I mean I'm still kind of human, but I was dying and they injected me with their blood to save my life, so now I'm part Kree and I bleed blue. Then it turned out that the energy explosion that nearly killed me also gave me abilities. The Kree had told me that they gave me those powers, but actually they were trying to keep my abilities under control. But I stopped them, and learned how to use my abilities." She held out her fist, showed off the glowy thing it could do. "So, yeah. It's been a wild ride since the last time we saw each other. Not that we saw much of each other, stuffed in that plane."</p><p>"I'm happy for you," Mara said. "I lost my own abilities for a while in there too, but they're back now and more consistent than ever before. And no Emperor whispering—or screaming—in my brain. But speaking of...you said Kree. That's not the first time I've heard of that race. Do you remember... I mean, while you were..."</p><p>Carol blinked at her, as a vague, dream-like memory came back to her. "I...did I visit you while I was amnesiac? I did, didn't I." She really ought to have taken Talos up on his offer to help her look more through her memories from the last few years. But then, how would she even have known what to tell him to look for? She saw Mara so rarely that she wouldn't have guessed that they would have crossed paths during that time. "You weren't calling yourself Mara, I think...some short name...Jade, I think?"</p><p>"Yes, that's my full name," said Mara. "Mara Jade. And you were calling yourself Vers, but it really <em>was</em> you. I wasn't sure. You seemed so certain that you weren't Carol."</p><p>"Yeah, they really did a number on me," Carol said. "My full name's Carol Danvers, by the way. They got the name Vers from the end of my actual name."</p><p>"I like Carol better," Mara said. "So since that <em>was</em> you, that means every single time either of us have fallen through into another universe, we've ended up crossing paths. I wonder why that is. A couple times when I've been on planets with decent libraries, I've looked for more information on what the fabric between the universes consists of and what causes it to become thin, but I haven't found much. It's completely different from the boundary between normal space and hyperspace, I know that much, but nobody says what it actually <em>is</em>."</p><p>"Well, I'd be interested in researching it myself, but I've got a few more pressing duties," Carol said. "There's this other alien race, the Skrulls. The Kree were hunting them down and I thought they were evil but actually they were just refugees trying to find a home because their planet was destroyed. So now I'm helping them in their hunt for a new home."</p><p>"Sounds like you're on the right side now," Mara said. "It feels good, doesn't it? Realizing that even though you believed the wrong thing for far too long, and served evil people who you wish you'd never known at all, and you've still got a lot of regrets about all the things that you did for them, in the end you did the right thing and made the right choice."</p><p>"Are you talking about the Emperor?"</p><p>Mara nodded. "Sometimes I wonder if deep down I always knew how terrible he was, and was just lying to myself. But the things he had me do were often things that needed to be done regardless. Hunting down corruption, keeping his governors from taking advantage of people. But I still wish I'd never known him at all. Not that I had a choice about it. I was just a young child when he came for me."</p><p>"So when I saw you, I think you were working in a bar. Was that for a mission?"</p><p>"I don't know if you remember everything we talked about," Mara said, "but you may recall my mentioning that my employer had died. That was the Emperor. He was killed by Darth Vader, but at the time I thought Luke Skywalker had killed him. That's Vader's son, he's a friend of mine now. The Emperor had always been able to speak into my mind, and he showed me a false image of his death at both of their hands, and then he told me that I must kill Skywalker." She closed her eyes. "Even after his death, his command still screamed in my mind and wouldn't let go."</p><p>"That was the dying wish you talked about," Carol said, wishing again that she could have had the Skrulls give her a clearer memory of that conversation at the bar.</p><p>"It was. So I tried to kill Skywalker for a bit, but then we ended up needing to work together, and it was pretty nice except for the part where I still wanted to kill him."</p><p>"So did you?"</p><p>"Yes and no. I fulfilled the Emperor's last command, so he doesn't scream in my head anymore. But I didn't actually kill Skywalker. I killed his clone, Luuke."</p><p>"His clone Luke? They couldn't be bothered to give the clone a different name?"</p><p>"No, Luuke." Mara dragged the vowel sound out. "Two U's. I know, it's ridiculous, but I didn't feel like arguing because I was too thankful for the loophole."</p><p>"Hey, I haven't met very many clones, so I can't judge. I'm glad you got the Emperor out of your head. It sounds like you're doing better these days."</p><p>"Yeah, Thrawn's been defeated, the Empire is finally starting to give up the fight: we've still got a lot of work ahead of us but I think the galaxy is finally headed in a good direction. It sounds like you're doing better, too, and I'm glad. I'm only sorry that I didn't realize Vers really was you, or maybe I could have helped you get your memories back sooner."</p><p>"It's not your fault." Carol dug in the left side pocket of her uniform, feeling through the variety of objects there until she felt the smooth metal she sought. "It's too bad you didn't get a glimpse of this, though, or you <em>would </em>have been able to know for sure. Though even if we'd known that, I don't know how I would have gotten my memories back." She held up the head of the ornamented hairpin that Mara had given her so many years ago. "I had it in a pocket of my flight suit the day I crashed, and somehow I managed to keep it with me all through my life as a Kree."</p><p>"I still have a scrap of your baseball, too," Mara said, pulling a pouch from her jacket pocket and producing the piece of stitched leather. It was much the worse for wear since Carol had seen it last. "It's continued to get smaller since we were on your F-15. I took a direct hit from a blaster on the pocket I had it in, which burned up a third of it, and the edges are a bit singed. Bacta took care of my injury in no time, but the baseball wasn't so lucky."</p><p>"I'm glad it's survived after everything. I'd offer you a new memento to replace it, but I didn't bring anything with me."</p><p>"I'd rather keep this for as long as it lasts, because of all the memories. It's the only thing I have from before I was the Emperor's Hand. I mean, I still served him back then as a child, but still of all my belongings it's the one I've had the longest and I appreciate that. Don't worry, as an adult, I know how to handle my lightsaber better and I keep it and the scrap well separated."</p><p>"So what's a lightsaber, anyway?"</p><p>Mara stood up and unclipped a metal cylinder from her belt. There was a snap and a hiss as she held it out in front of her, and then a length of blue plasma burst into being in the air above it. "It's a Jedi weapon. Well, Sith use them too. It's difficult to achieve much with unless you can feel the Force and use it to guide your actions, but if you can then it's a decently versatile weapon."</p><p>"The Force. Is that the source of your abilities?" Carol thought of Mar-Vell's light-speed engine that had given her her own abilities. She could still see the flash of the explosion when she closed her eyes, even so many years later and after a bout of amnesia.</p><p>"I don't know if I'd say source so much as conduit," Mara said. "The Force is kind of like...well, an atmosphere on a planet. It's almost everywhere, and it gives you the ability to do things that you couldn't do if it weren't there—"</p><p>"Like fly an F-15," Carol interposed.</p><p>"Exactly. But it's not like just anybody can do it just because the Force or atmosphere is there. I'm not sure exactly where my ability to use it comes from, though, whether the Emperor gave it to me or just encouraged abilities that were already there. I suspect the latter, but on the other hand, what does it really matter anymore? He's gone, and I'm still here."</p><p>"Yeah," Carol said, thinking of the people in her own life who had faded into her past. She'd be dead if it wasn't for Yon-Rogg, even though he'd lied to her about a thousand things afterwards. She wondered where Mara would be if the Emperor hadn't come into her life. She'd probably be better off, but on the other hand, the two of them might never have met. Carol supposed she'd take that trade if she had the opportunity, for Mara's sake, but at the moment she couldn't bring herself to wish very strongly for it.</p><p>"There's a shift change in twenty minutes," Mara said, "and there will be more people around after that. If you want to avoid having everybody on the ship know that you're here, you should probably head back before then. Though if you want to stay, we can make up some explanation. Karrde trusts me enough that he'll let me get away with a lie that's completely different from the first lie I told, though I'll probably have to tell him the truth eventually."</p><p>"Well, if I stay too long, my friends will probably try to come looking for me, and then either your people or my people will probably shoot somebody and we don't want that."</p><p>"Right," Mara said, and opened the door.</p><p>"Well, I'm glad you're doing better than you were last time I saw you," Carol said as she followed her down the corridor.</p><p>"Same to you," Mara replied. "It's been a difficult few years, but I'm glad they happened."</p><p>"Well, good luck mopping up the vestiges of the Empire," Carol said.</p><p>"Good luck finding your friends a new home," Mara said. She dropped her voice to a whisper as they got closer to the bridge. "Wait here. Remember, if anybody sees you, you're not actually here, you're a high-tech hologram. Give me half a minute, then slip through into that closet you hid in before. Which by the way we're probably going to have to get rid of, because it makes too good of a hiding place for intruders."</p><p>Carol nodded, crossed her arms, and leaned back against the wall of the corridor. Then remembering the hologram thing, she stepped forward an inch so that she wasn't touching it.</p><p>Mara nodded, and slid open the door to the bridge. "Aves, have there been any other craft within sensor range since you came on duty?"</p><p>The reply was inaudible.</p><p>"Did you save the sensor readout? What model was it, do you think it was a merchant vessel?"</p><p>Carol stuck her head around the corner. The blond from earlier was leaning over the control panel next to Mara. Over his shoulder, Mara flashed Carol a quick smile and an aborted wave. Carol waved back, and tiptoed onto the bridge. She headed for the closet, but halfway there she realized she could see the flicker of the portal, and decided not to waste any more time. She threw Mara a thumbs up, and stepped through, back onto the Skrulls' ship.</p><p>The corridor was full of Skrulls hurrying back and forth. "You're back!" one of them exclaimed, and everybody immediately turned to look at her.</p><p>"We were starting to get worried about you," Talos said. He was standing at the end of the corridor holding an assortment of weaponry.</p><p>"Aw, were you putting together a rescue mission?" Carol grinned. "That's so sweet of you. But I was fine, really."</p><p>Talos glanced down as his daughter pushed past him and over to Carol, throwing her arms around her for the second time that day. "I was worried you weren't going to come back," she said.</p><p>"I'll always come back," Carol said. She patted the little girl on the head. "And if I don't, apparently your dad's going to come looking for me and shoot anybody who gets in our way, so it's going to be fine." She looked up at Talos and winked. "As it happens, I was visiting a friend, so I'm glad you didn't shoot anybody. But thanks for the thought. Is there any dinner left?"</p><p>It was good to be back. As much as she enjoyed paying a visit to another universe, she didn't think she'd ever want to stay there for very long. This was where she belonged.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"So," Mara said to the ceiling of the cave. "I don't suppose any of you know whether anybody's shown up here looking for me."</p><p>The almost-voices around her intensified in response to her comment, but she was still unable to make out any words or sense in whatever they were attempting to communicate. Mara didn't bother to say anything further, but crossed her arms and glared at the mynock-like creatures perched there.</p><p>Unless she'd lost an entire day—unlikely, she hoped—after she'd knocked herself out on that rock, then she'd been here on Nirauan for four days. Karrde would send a rescue party just as soon as the <em>Starry Ice </em>got in touch with him, Mara was certain: so all she had to do was wait. She'd been in plenty worse situations.</p><p>But her head still hurt, and she was on an inimical planet with an unknown fortress, and the galaxy was still at war just as it had been for almost as long as Mara could remember, and the Bothans and the Caamasi were at each other's throats and everybody was wondering if this was the crisis that would finally bring down the New Republic, just as they had wondered for every crisis before this one. Mara flopped her head back against the pile of extra clothing that she was using for a pillow. Most of all, she was just plain tired.</p><p>And it would be at least a week before Karrde's rescue team arrived. Even if the <em>Starry Ice</em> had left as soon as Mara's recorder had sent its pulse transmission of her fate, and if Faughn had headed directly to the closest point from which she could send a message to Karrde via hyperspace relay...even then, they would need to get a second ship, and they would need to reconnoiter, and there were so many other variables that could lose them time, and meanwhile here Mara was, being babysat by a bunch of unspeaking leather wings that wouldn't let her have her weapons and couldn't talk to her.</p><p>There was a flicker in the corner of the room, and Mara glared half-heartedly at it. If she couldn't communicate with these creatures, she wished they'd just go away and leave her alone. Then she blinked and shone her glow rod at it. It had been nearly a decade since the last time she'd crossed paths with her friend Carol, and sometimes she'd begun to wonder if she would even remember what the thinness in the fabric of the universe looked like. But she was pretty sure that was what she was looking at, right here.</p><p>Just in case she was wrong and it was actually some aspect of the cave—or some strange technology from the fortress nearby—Mara didn't immediately try to reach into the other universe. First, she collected the various belongings that she had scattered around her campsite over the last few days, returned them all to her pack, and fastened the pack tightly on her back. She held her glow rod up high and started forward. "So I'm going to go take a look at something," she said to her unresponsive flying companions. "I'll be back in a while. Uh...don't wait up."</p><p>She reached out to the flicker, and it responded just as it had every time before. She stepped through into the sterile corridors of a large spaceship.</p><p>"Show us your hands!"</p><p>"Who are you?"</p><p>"Are you armed?"</p><p>"Where did you come from?"</p><p>Make that a not-so-sterile large spaceship with a lot of angry-looking reptilian humanoids—a bit reminiscent of Trandoshans in appearance—with weapons. Lots of weapons. All of which were pointed at Mara. Mara glanced around what she realized must be a hangar bay, but there were no humans to be seen. Surely Carol must be here, shouldn't she? Every time the universe had grown thin around Mara, Carol had always been there.</p><p>But she wasn't here now, and Mara didn't want to risk mentioning her name until she knew what she was dealing with. So she reached out to the Force—very weak, as it always was in this universe, but still enough for Mara's purposes—and pulled some metal pipes off of the wall. They fell to the ground with a nice clatter, sending liquid splashing every which way. The aliens all looked towards the source of the commotion, and as they did, Mara ran in the opposite direction.</p><p>Whether because her assailants had called in an intruder alert or because the ship hadn't been that full to begin with, Mara didn't pass anybody in the corridors as she ran. No reptilian aliens, no other aliens, no humans, and definitely no Carol.</p><p>She rounded a corner and found several of the aliens there in front of her, while she could still hear some of them in hot pursuit from the direction she'd come. Mara really wished the weird flying creatures hadn't taken her lightsaber away from her, because it would really have come in handy about now. In lieu of that, she reached out and grabbed one of the aliens' weapons with the Force. She felt a flash of surprise from their direction, and pressed her advantage, shoving the rest of their weapons to point in the air as she dodged past them.</p><p>Now they were all on her tail as they ran, but since they knew the ship and she didn't, she wasn't sure how long that would last. She figured that she had two options: she could make a run for it, dodge back through the portal—hoping that they didn't follow her through—and go back to her boring cave hang-out time.</p><p>Or she could hope they weren't enemies of Carol's, and that maybe she was around here somewhere.</p><p>"Where did you come from and what do you want?" called one of the frontrunning not-Trandoshans.</p><p>Mara spun around and pressed her back against the side of the corridor, holding her stolen weapon—similar to a blaster in shape, though she had no idea what sort of projectiles it fired—down slightly, where she could have it ready to fire in an instant but didn't look quite so inimical in the meantime. "I'm a friend of Carol Danvers," Mara said. "Is she around here? I was hoping to pay her a visit but I seem to have missed my destination slightly."</p><p>"Well why didn't you say you knew Carol in the first place?" he replied, holstering his weapon at once. He held out a hand and the rest of Mara's pursuers lowered their weapons as well. "Are you her friend Mara?"</p><p>"She's told you about me?"</p><p>"A little bit. I don't suppose she's mentioned me. I'm Talos, also a friend of Carol's."</p><p>"Pleasure to make your acquaintance," Mara said. "But I'm afraid she didn't mention you."</p><p>"Now where did you come through? We need to make sure to block it off so that nobody falls through into your universe."</p><p>"Carol told you about <em>that</em>?"</p><p>"Only once our ship had moved on so none of us could have gone exploring even if we'd wanted to. Though I'd already guessed that it must be something of the sort, the way she'd disappeared out of the middle of a corridor on my ship." He beckoned to one of his underlings. "But we really do need to know where it is, in case it's somewhere the children are playing."</p><p>"You arrived almost immediately after I came through, so wherever I was standing, it was about there."</p><p>"I'm glad to know that our intruder alarms didn't miss you," Talos said. "And the children aren't allowed in the hangar without supervision, so that's for the best. You two, go block that area off with something and then keep a guard around there. And don't fall in yourselves." He turned back to Mara. "After Carol told me, I kept watching for it to happen again, but she neglected to mention quite how rarely these portals open up."</p><p>"Yes, it's been ten years for me. How long's it been here?"</p><p>"Twenty-six."</p><p>"Oh." Mara handed the blaster back to him grip first. "It hasn't been this long for me since the gap between our first and second visits. And I don't think it's ever been that long for Carol. It's..." She shrugged, and almost trailed off, but Talos was looking at her attentively, and after all, both from his words and actions, he seemed to be a friend of Carol's, so she thought she might as well trust him. "I've only seen her four times in my entire life, and I don't seem likely to change that soon. Carol's my friend no matter what, but I'm not sure how much of a friend we can be to each other when we see each other so rarely."</p><p>"Carol talks about you sometimes," Talos said. "Not quite as often as she does the Rambeaus and her late friend Fury, but definitely more often than she mentions anybody else. She certainly still thinks of you as a friend. And besides, she travels so much that she wouldn't have much time for friends regardless, so I don't know if it matters much whether they're on the other side of the galaxy or on the other side of the division between universes."</p><p>"Speaking of which, where <em>is </em>Carol?"</p><p>"You just missed her. She's checking on a settlement on the moon we're orbiting, helping them repair their atmosphere generator. The galaxy is in disrepair ever since Thanos, and we're all busy trying to keep things together, Carol especially so. But she'll be back by dinner."</p><p>"Thanos?"</p><p>"He attacked our universe four years ago. Killed half of every species, not counting everyone who died in the aftermath. My wife among them. We're still reeling from it after this much time, and I don't know if we'll ever truly recover."</p><p>"I'm sorry."</p><p>"If you haven't heard of that happening, I hope that means that your own universe wasn't affected?"</p><p>"I think I'd know if it was," Mara said.</p><p>"Well, I'm glad to know that it didn't happen everywhere. It's good to know that somewhere out there is a universe where everyone is still alive. Though I shouldn't assume that your universe doesn't have its own problems."</p><p>"Well, half the galaxy is squabbling about an incident from forty years ago where Bothan saboteurs betrayed the planet Caamas," Mara said. "And now there's mysterious spaceships appearing from a planet I'd never heard of and sending transmissions about Grand Admiral Thrawn. Thrawn might not be anywhere near as evil as your Thanos—he's more interested in conquest than in killing—but he still wasn't what was best for the galaxy. There can't be another Emperor. I loved the first Emperor once, but that was before I realized how evil he really was."</p><p>"As interesting as this all is," Talos said, "we were about to have lunch before we found out there was an intruder on board. Perhaps we could continue our conversation in the dining hall."</p><p>As much as Talos and his confederates looked like Trandoshans, their food was far more reminiscent of Mirialan cuisine. It wasn't Mara's favorite, but she still thought it made for an extremely pleasant break from ration bars.</p><p>Her hosts made sure her plate was full, but when Mara didn't show interest in further conversation, they left her to her thoughts. She wondered what have happened to her own galaxy—her own universe—if Thanos's assault had reached it. Who among her friends would have been lost? Karrde? Skywalker? High Councilor Organa Solo, Chief of State Gavrisom, or the rest of the New Republic High Council? If the galaxy was barely holding together now, how much worse would it be if they lost some of the people who were doing the holding?</p><p>Carol must be devastated. How many people had she lost? Mara ran a hand over her brow and stared at her plate. It was hard to imagine the scope of something like that.</p><p>"Mara?"</p><p>Mara jumped up. "You're back early! Talos said you wouldn't be back till dinner."</p><p>Carol ran the rest of the way over to her and gave her a hug. "I'm glad to see you," she said. "I'm glad you're all right. Did the snap hit your universe?"</p><p>Mara shook her head and hugged Carol back. "Thankfully, no. I'm so sorry to hear what you've been going through here. And I'm sorry I couldn't visit sooner."</p><p>"It's okay," Carol said. "I've been so terribly busy that I wouldn't have had much time for visits. Not that I have much time for a visit now, but I can spare an afternoon. Especially since my afternoon plans just got canceled."</p><p>"What happened with the generator?" asked Talos.</p><p>"They managed to get it fixed without my powers. Turned out it wasn't the whole thing that was broken, just one single piece, so they figured out a replacement for it. No burst of energy or jerry-rigging required."</p><p>"It's too bad you didn't leave a minute later," Talos said. "Your friend arrived just as you headed out, and we chased her around with blasters and batons for a few minutes before she mentioned that she was a friend of yours."</p><p>"I wasn't sure whether I should risk mentioning your name in case I stumbled across enemies of yours accidentally or something," Mara explained.</p><p>"I'm sorry I almost missed you."</p><p>"Oh don't worry, I was going to wait until you got back. Back in my own universe I'm hanging out in a dreary cave waiting for my boss to send a retrieval team, so I can afford to spare a few hours."</p><p>"Well then, if you're done with your lunch, why don't you let me give you the tour."</p><p>"I'm sure I'll get a lot more out of it than when I was running around the corridors with a dozen of your friends chasing after me," Mara said, and stood up. "Nice meeting you, Talos, everybody."</p><p>With nothing but a dark cave waiting for her in her own universe, Mara didn't see a reason to hurry back. She and Carol stretched the tour of Talos's spaceship out for several hours, pausing every few meters to share an anecdote or a memory or a joke. Carol didn't smile nearly as easily as she used to, but the longer they talked, the more she seemed to relax, until finally Mara was able to get her to laugh with a story about a prank that one of the new recruits had—with Mara's and Chin's full awareness, if not outright assistance—played on Aves as revenge for the time they had neglected to inform the recruit that Booster Terrik's place happened to be a star destroyer. "Standard operating procedure," Mara said.</p><p>"Or in other words, you pull that stunt every time you get a new recruit," Carol said.</p><p>"Hey, any time you can combine fun with combat testing employees in a low-stakes environment, you take it."</p><p>Carol countered with an anecdote about her time in the Air Force, an epic guys-versus-girls prank war that went on for weeks. "I think it started out that they were trying to make us feel unwelcome, but I ended up feeling more included then than any other time, because at least they were treating me as 'one of the guys', for what that was worth." She stuck her hands in her pockets, and they continued down the corridor.</p><p>Eventually they found themselves back in the hangar. Talos was there, speaking to the two guards. "Leaving already?" he asked.</p><p>"We don't know how long the portals stay open," Mara said, "and I can't risk getting stuck here. There will be people coming to rescue me and I need to be there when they arrive or who knows what sort of risks they'll take looking for me."</p><p>"It's too bad we don't know when another portal will open to your universe," Talos said. "I'd offer to take your place for a while. You and Carol both need a break, I think."</p><p>Mara raised an eyebrow. "You think you could take my place?"</p><p>Talos's form rippled slowly, and then Mara found herself looking in a mirror. Same red hair, same practical jumpsuit and jacket. Darker undereye circles than she'd expected, but then she hadn't been having the best week.</p><p>"Not bad," she told him. "But can you do this?" She grabbed the nearest spare part with the Force, and sent it tumbling end over end through the air in a circle around the hangar.</p><p>Carol laughed, and Talos joined in. "I'm afraid not," he said, rippling back to his original form.</p><p>"Thanks for the offer anyway," Mara said. "I'm sorry that your galaxy is having such a tough time of things, and good luck with everything."</p><p>"Thanks," Carol said. "Good luck with the Bothan thing and the Thrawn thing."</p><p>"We need it," Mara said. "Seriously, I can't believe how worked up everybody is over something that happened forty years ago."</p><p>"Well, let's just hope that it isn't that long before we see each other again."</p><p>"Definitely." Mara looked at Carol. "Believe me, I'd rather stay here."</p><p>"I'll time the portal this time," Carol said. "I don't have anything planned for this evening. Then next time we'll know whether you can risk staying a bit longer."</p><p>"I'd like that," Mara said. She gave her a halfhearted wave, then stepped through. Immediately everything was dark. She blinked a few times, then fumbled for her glow rod. "Okay, I'm back," she said in the general direction of the ceiling. "Did you miss me?" There was a flutter of almost-voices above her. "Yeah, I thought so." She sat down on one of the rock outcroppings and leaned her head back. "I'm not going to say it's good to be back, but it's not <em>not </em>good to be back. You ever wonder what would happen to the galaxy if half of it died?" There was another flutter, and she wondered how much of this they were understanding. It would probably be wiser not to say too much, but she was just so tired. "I never wondered about it either, not until today. Maybe we're luckier than we realize."</p><p>And if Mara was luckier still, she wouldn't be stuck here for a month, because this cave was getting really old. Another week, maybe two, and the <em>Starry Ice </em>should be back with reinforcements. She couldn't wait.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It had been a month since Thanos's snap had been undone, and as busy as the ravaged galaxy had been keeping Carol before that point, she was even busier now. She had finally helped the Skrulls get their adopted planet into shape; it was still going to be a meager winter but they had done a crash course in farming and had enough crops planted that hopefully next year ought to be better.</p><p>There were plenty of other planets that needed help too, but Carol had decided to stop by Earth before she continued on. She wanted to check in with the Avengers—working as a team still wasn't completely Carol's thing, but she'd grown used to them over the past five years and she knew they'd appreciate the contact. And she had to admit to herself that she also wanted to see Fury again, and remind herself that he was fine. Everybody was fine. Or at least, they were all getting there.</p><p>The wizard Strange was standing in the entry hall of Avengers HQ when Carol touched down, doing something with green glowy circles in the air. They didn't seem to be making portals like they had the previous time Carol had seen him work his magic, but still, it got her thinking. After all, nobody knew she was coming, so it wasn't as if they'd be waiting around for her if she took a detour. She headed over to Strange. "So, your portals."</p><p>"Yes?"</p><p>"Are they, like, intra-universe only or can they cross into alternate universes?"</p><p>"I haven't made an extensive study of alternate universes," he said, waving his hands in a quick gesture that made the circles disappear. "I believe it would be somewhat more complicated, though certainly not impossible. Why do you ask? What do you know of alternate universes?"</p><p>"Well, I've got a friend there. She said that she heard that the fabric between the universes grows thin sometimes, but she didn't know what caused it, and neither do I. But we've crossed paths half a dozen times over the years, either with her coming into our universe or me going through into hers. Is that something you've heard of?"</p><p>"Well..." Strange listed off a bunch of magic technobabble that Carol didn't make heads or tails of. She wondered if Mara would understand any of it. "What does it look like when the fabric grows thin, or whatever you want to call it?" he asked finally.</p><p>"It's like a flickering in the air. Barely there unless you're looking right at it. When you touch it, then you can see through to the other side. Once you've gone through, it looks the same on that side as it did on the other."</p><p>"And have you always ended up in your friend's universe, or sometimes in other universes?</p><p>"Always in her universe, and always somewhere where she's quite nearby. Or vice-versa when she shows up near me."</p><p>"That's odd," Strange said. "It ought to be very uncommon for a rift to occur in the vicinity of the same person more than once or twice in a lifetime. For it to occur in the same vicinity as two different people simultaneously, half a dozen times, is statistically near-impossible."</p><p>"But it's happened."</p><p>He raised an eyebrow. "Which raises an obvious question. Have you kept anything in your possession from that other universe?"</p><p>"Oh." Carol retrieved the ornamented head of Mara's old hairpin from a side pocket on her uniform. "She gave me this the first time I met her. Well, it was bigger at the time; I broke off the pin part. And I gave her a baseball, which she still had a piece of last time I asked."</p><p>"That ought to do it," Strange said. "So do you want me to use this to open a rift into your friend's universe?"</p><p>Carol didn't even have to think about it. "Definitely. We've never had the time when we've crossed paths to just sit and chat. All we've been able to do is hit the high notes and hurry off again. But if we can control it, we've got options. We could build an actual normal-person friendship instead of being cut-rate intergalactic pen pals."</p><p>"I'll need to do some research," Strange said. "And I'm holding onto this. Come back in two days."</p><p>"Okay, thanks." Carol shrugged, and wandered off to find Fury.</p><p> </p><p>When she returned two days later, Strange was standing exactly where she'd left him, although this time the circles were orange. "Did you figure out what to do?" Carol asked, leaning against the closest wall with her hands on her hips.</p><p>"I believe so," Strange said. He produced the broken hairpin from somewhere and set it on the ground in front of him. "Of course, I've never seen your friend's universe for myself, so you'll have to be the one to confirm, but I'd be shocked if I didn't get it right." He moved his hands, and another of his circles appeared in the air in front of him. This one grew larger and larger, not so much a flicker as a full-blown window into another universe. Carol stepped forward to stand in front of it. The metal room on the other side certainly looked like it could be part of a spaceship in Mara's universe, but then most rooms on spaceships in any universe looked much alike, so she didn't think it was really enough to go on. She shrugged and stepped forward anyway—</p><p>And then there was Mara, poking her head through from the other side! "Something new?" she called. "This is a lot more than a flicker."</p><p>"Yes, I went and talked to a wizard," Carol said. "Doctor Strange, this is my friend Mara. Mara, this is Doctor Strange. We wouldn't have won the war against Thanos without him."</p><p>"You won, then," Mara said. "Congratulations."</p><p>"Thanks," Carol said. "And now that everything's over, he had enough time to look into alternate universes for me, and figure out how to open a portal without waiting for the whims of the universe. Now we can finally get together like real friends—well, normal friends—do."</p><p>"I think we're already real friends," Mara said. "But what are you waiting for? Come on through!"</p><p>Carol glanced over at Strange. "Take the pin with you," he said. "The portal will stay open until you bring it back through."</p><p>"That's simple enough," Carol said. She stepped forward. Behind her, the rooms of Avengers headquarters surrounded her with concrete. Ahead of her, the futuristic metal of Mara's spaceship glinted with dim diffuse light. And right below her was half of the ornamented hairpin that had started this all. Carol reached down and picked it up. "Thanks for your help."</p><p>"I suppose I owed you after your assistance in the final battle," Strange said. "Enjoy your visit."</p><p>Carol smiled. She tucked the pin into her pocket, stepped forward, and followed Mara into the other universe.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>